I've heard many reports of super-fast bootups with nitro, but nitro-or-not, I've always had a really slow linux boot. It could just be my processor, or the number of services I start. I was wondering if anyone would suggest a diagnostic utility I could use to post my actual boot statistics here, and have my problem diagnosed.

I've heard many reports of super-fast bootups with nitro, but nitro-or-not, I've always had a really slow linux boot.

My boot takes about 1-2 minutes from grub to login.

I can't offer any direct help apart from the usual 'check your hdparm settings' and so on (I think a search should provide threads dedicated to this).

I also would take a bootup from power on to kde start in 6.2 seconds with a massive bucket of salt. I'm sory, but I just don't believe it. Think about it, when the computer is switched on it has to go through its own BIOS check and startup, then linux starts, even with no services (and I mean none!) then X has to be initialised and started, then a login (must be automatic for that to happen so quickly), followed by a full kde start up - all in 6.2s.....

I have a stripped down install when I do some tests with minimal services, no apache or mysql, etc, just metalog and mounting one partition, and it takes a lot longer than that (mine is not a super computer by any means, but a 3200+ XP, 512 PC3200 RAM, and one mounted partition on a 7200 disk takes longer...)

I genuinly hope I get flamed for this and someone proves me wrong (because I would love to see it for myself) but unless I see a video of it from blank screen, see a finger press the power button and watch it for myself then I remain rather sceptical of such claims (should be easy to prove, a 6.2s mpeg would be less than 100Kb. I will also humbly apologise and eat my smelly socks)

Anyway, look at your startup settings (hdparm, how many partitions you mount, modules loading, etc). As long as the performance when it is on is not affected then I would not be too concerned, I mean, how often do you reboot?_________________usefuljaja.com - VPS Tutorials

Well I have been working on quick boot systems for some time now and let me share my exp.:
On a VIA C3 Antaur 1 GHz 256MB DDR laptop (hdd speed is around 30mbps) I get below 30 second boot to gnome desktop consistantly (boot means - gnome completes drawing the panels startbutton icons etc and i can click on somehting) .

Gnome is set up for auto login after 2 seconds and i have deducted those 2 seconds from the figure. NO service are started except xfs. after nautilus has drawn the desktop I start a script in the background which starts services. my kernel is only 5mb incl the modules since i only compile for the h/w on my laptop. but it still has bottleneck things like bootsplash, supermount, squashfs etc. My clients only interested in via cpu laptops so i haven't tried on other intel/amd since will need to get and compile patches for all the hardware.

Since I am supposed to do 10 second boot for them I have finally used the softwaresuspend2 and hacked the logoff/shutdown/restart button to do a suspend, hide the suspend messages by not compiling the text progress option and stop/start some service/modules etc. This currently gives me 15-18 second pseudo boot.

What do you use this machine for? If it's purely a desktop machine then you don't need apache, ssh and ntpd. If it's purely a server machine then you don't need alsasound, hotplug and splash. Either way I think you can live without xfs (unless you have about a million different fonts.)

xfs allows you to dynamically load fonts into memory as and when they are needed, without xfs you have load all your fonts simultaneously. That sounds great, until you realise that for most people fonts take up a negligible amount of memory and it's faster just to have all loaded in memory, ready for use. If you have a lot of fonts, or very complex fonts, or if you regularly connect to your X session remotely and need to have the fonts distributed then it it's a good idea. For most Gentoo users it's a bit OTT.

There seems to be a handful of people who can't connect to my server. I have no idea why and, as far as I can tell, there is no connection with them. My thinking, as there is nothing wrong with the server end, and all usual tests (traceroute, dns checks, firewall checks, kernels checks, reboots with different configs) is that some ISPs are at fault, although how I don't know. Last night, downloads of this patchset pipped the 8GB mark for this month so am stumped as to why some simply can't connect.

Anyway, I would suggest trying again (although I would suspect you have).

Secondly if it continues contact your ISP and ask them if they can contact it.

If there is another mirror (and I can't remember if there is one for this nitro) then you will have to search each page for the link.

Sorry I can't do anything else.

Edit: Just looking at your posted code snippet and you are using the ebuild - did you manage to get that ok?_________________usefuljaja.com - VPS Tutorials

Well, I broke down. I emerged nitro4 with the MM patches, and I must say that it runs beautifully. I haven't had any stability issues with it, but I can't get hdparm to work via the startup script OR manually from the cmdline. it hardlocks the box on both tries. I gave up on it. with this kernel, this old p3-450 can play a xvid avi in mplayer using less than 30 percent of my processor, while on gentoo-dev-sources it takes somewhere around 35 to 40 on the same file with the same service set. Must be something to do with the kernel latency patches. Oh well.

There seems to be a handful of people who can't connect to my server. I have no idea why and, as far as I can tell, there is no connection with them. My thinking, as there is nothing wrong with the server end, and all usual tests (traceroute, dns checks, firewall checks, kernels checks, reboots with different configs) is that some ISPs are at fault, although how I don't know. Last night, downloads of this patchset pipped the 8GB mark for this month so am stumped as to why some simply can't connect.

Anyway, I would suggest trying again (although I would suspect you have).

Secondly if it continues contact your ISP and ask them if they can contact it.

If there is another mirror (and I can't remember if there is one for this nitro) then you will have to search each page for the link.

Sorry I can't do anything else.

Edit: Just looking at your posted code snippet and you are using the ebuild - did you manage to get that ok?

Hi.
Got a problem.
This is what I get when I run X: _LoaderFileToMem() read() failed: No such file or directory
I'm running Xorg 6.8.1 custom compiled (gcc 3.3.4) on Slackware 10.0. Happens on 2.6.8.1-cko4 and 2.6.10-nitro4
Didn't happen with 6.7.0. I think it has something to do with my compilation. I probably set something wrong in host.def.
When I set driver to "vesa" all goes well. X runs fine. When I change vesa to fglrx
(the ATI driver module) then I get this strange error.
The question is: is it the driver or my Xorg compilation ??_________________Powered by Gentoo on an Athlon-XP-M

Thats a prob with earler ATI drivers, you have to update to the latest release for Xorg support._________________System: predatorbox
Distro: Arch Linux x86_64
Current projects: blackhole, convmedia and anything else I cook up.

The only thing that comes into my mind is did you compile Xorg static? I'v had issues with Xorg being static and not being able to load drivers...._________________System: predatorbox
Distro: Arch Linux x86_64
Current projects: blackhole, convmedia and anything else I cook up.

Nop. I didn`t play with this stuff and Slackware installs a modular X (I used Slackbuilds - scripts Slackware maintainers use to build binaries).
Hmm... Looking into the xc/config/cf/ files.. maybe your right.
Thanks predatrofreak. I`ll recompile it when I wake up, it`s already past 1.00 am here._________________Powered by Gentoo on an Athlon-XP-M

i think is because the kernel have some patches different from the standard
sorry for my english
(ps i'm sure the problem is in the configuration because changing the compiled/modules the error change)_________________Remember! Gnu is not Unix!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yoJI-Tl94g GLORY GLORY HYPNOTOAD
Linux Counter[code:1]
User n° #466586
ID 375005 EkatombeII
ID 375006 Apocalypto
ID 375007 KHP[/code:1]

This error is caused by the SWSUSP2 support in the kernel. I believe the nitro patchset applies some of the SWSUSP2 changes whether the option is enabled or not, unless the kernel devs have made these changes in the kernel source tree for compatibility reasons. There are two ways to fix this:

1) Enable Software Suspend 2 (SWSUSP2) in the kernel. This causes the IPW2200 code to be built with the proper call to the workqueue command, and considering that you have an ipw2200 you're probably on a laptop and will want SWSUSP2 support at some point anyway.
2) Hit ctrl+z and modify the source yourself during the emerge process. This is tedious.

The last solution is to try to find/create a patch. I personally use SWSUSP2 so I don't run into this issue._________________Joshua Baergen